Occasionally we speak to someone at a school who doesn’t know that alongside iSAMS, we offer a fully-integrated cloud-based collaborative accounting solution to go with it! Naturally, it comes as a pleasant surprise to bursars and school finance staff to find out that there’s a comprehensive accountancy solution out there that’s built specifically for Independent Schools.
We’re talking about iFinance, of course. Over the years, we’ve developed our product set to encompass all aspects of school finance, from fee-billing to Admissions registration payments, secure invoicing and more, but today we’re going to share 5 things you may not know that iFinance can do...
- iFinance is fully browser independent
- Improvements to the fixed asset register
- Drag-and-drop notes and attachments
- Custom fields in iFinance
- Custom profiles
1. iFinance is fully browser independent
Something that should come as welcome news to anybody familiar with applications that rely on one specific browser – iFinance is now fully browser independent. That means you can boot up iFinance using Google Chrome.
2. Improvements to the fixed asset register
In recent months, our development team has been hard at work making improvements to the fixed asset register functionality in iFinance. When setting up a fixed asset, you are now able to link it back to an invoice.
Let's take buying a new school bus as an example. When adding the bus to the fixed asset register, you now have the option to link this to a supplier and then to any the invoice received from that supplier.
This is a great way to link a fixed asset back to your purchase ledger, enabling you to run more detailed, comprehensive reporting, as well as linking to the nominal ledger. This prevents any fixed assets from being left out in error.
3. Customisation of your Screen
Another handy feature in iFinance is the ability to customise your instance to suit the way you work, and this includes being able to drag and drop ‘notes’ and ‘attachments’ into any screen where you use them.
Most schools use the sales ledger area to record notes and attachments, but it’s easy to drag and drop the columns onto your screen wherever you need them, such as in the purchase ledger, the nominal ledger or even the fixed asset register.
Taking the same school bus example from earlier, using the notes and attachments feature you can easily add an attachment to the school bus entry – such as the V5C vehicle document – ready to be viewed with a simple click. Notes and attachments can also be used against the journal.
4. Custom fields in iFinance
iFinance is a flexible system – it was designed to be that way because we know that every school, and every person, has a unique way of working. The system will allow you to add a range of custom fields, allowing you to add fields such as ‘debtor classification’ to a record or a ‘next chase’ date.
iFinance will currently allow you to add up to 10 custom fields, with a range of data types including text, numbers or dates and even fixed responses from a drop-down menu. The beauty of this feature is that you can cater it to the specific needs of your department.
5. Custom profiles
One of the most intelligent aspects of iFinance is the ability to create custom profiles for the person using the system. For example, if your school has a Sales Ledger Clerk and they only need to deal with the sales ledger, simply set the permissions using custom profiles and that’s all they will see!
These granular customisation options range from year and period end management and importing/exporting data to sales invoicing and adjustments and many more.